Artículo completo del libro: Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects.

PETER: For sixteen years, Cresenciana Rodríguez Nieves, a 43- year -old doctor in the city of Puebla, at the base of the snowcapped Iztaccíhuatl volcano in the central Mexico, has used a wide variety of native plants, animals, and insect in her practice of what a she calls Méxica medicine (above). “This”, she says, “is the medicine practiced here before the Europeans came”. (She doesn’t like term “traditional medicine,” because she regards it as a pejorative term used to dismiss remedies based on centuries of folk experience.) Her expertise as a medicinal doctor has helped her to appreciate the wisdom of, say, treating goiter with stink bugs (they are rich in iodine deficiency). She treats anemia with grasshoppers, rheumatism with beeswax, eye cysts with flies---the range of medical application is enormous, she says. After an impromptu lecture, Cresenciana graciously serves us a delicious lunch of carrot soup and fresh corn tortillas (no bugs) and then shows us how to catch grasshoppers with a big woven basket in her backyard.

FAITH: In Oxaca, we stop chasing edible bugs long enough to explore the works of skilled weavers in the area---and we find more bugs. Female plant - feeding cochineal scale insects (Dactylopius coccus) are dried and crushed by the weavers and used in dye baths to give their yarns a vibrant red color. The cochineal is also used commercially to color commonly used items like dental plaque remover and sugarless candy, and more exotic items like the Italian liqueur Campari.

Lest anyone wonder for too long why only the female cochineal is used--- wonder no longer. The female cochineals live in small groups and eat prickly pear cactus. Males are solitary and eat nothing, because they have no mouth. They only live for about a week, during which time they grow wings, fly off to mate, and die.

I like to think of this as the work of nature in her imponderable wisdom.

To make half a kilo of dye, 75,000 insects are harvested by hand and plunged into boiling water to remove their protective coating. Then the bodies are ground into a powder. The result is a color that was so widely treasured in the late fifteenth century that the Aztecs demanded it as tribute from conquered tribes in cochineal areas. (In the Middle East, red dye from another scale insect, kermococcus vermilius, was almost as valuable; it was probably used by the ancient Sumerians.)  After the Spanish conquest, cochineal became a profitable Spanish monopoly. When Spain banned the exportation of live cochineal, French and Dutch bug bootleggers tried to smuggle them out. They were unsuccessful until the nineteenth century, when France created a cochineal industry in the- colonial Algeria. Peru and the Canary Islands also became big producers.

Cochineal dye was replaced on the marketplace by synthetics until the recent resurgence of interest in natural products. Today many Oaxacans (right, the weaver Benito with a mortar of ground cochineal) have come back to cochineal to give their weaving the prized traditional look. Not everyone is happy going back to natural products though: Lipsticks made with dyes from insects are not considered kosher by Orthodox Jews. 

Fuente:

Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects. 

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